New Beginnings, Old Endings, Secrets Secreting, 2019-20

Exhibitions and Presentations

New Beginnings, Old Endings, Secrets Secreting (2019-2020) is a series of diaphanous portraits created in part with machine learning algorithms. Southworth’s artworks have an unrefined yet overly saturated quality to them. Closeups of smudged faces appear to disperse into featureless surroundings. Rooted in his previous work involving facial imperfections abstracted from beauty advertisements, this series embraces the artifacts of early AI-generated images. These flaws—raw and vulnerable—contrast sharply with the polished outputs of today, embodying a nascent authenticity that feels poignant and human.

In early 2019 Southworth helped beta-test Playform, a web-based platform that allowed artists to easily train their own Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with image sets. Southworth used the Creative Morph GAN and partial sequences from his prior portrait series Color Balance as a dataset. Wanting images that felt unfinished, resembling underpaintings or blurry faces, he often selected generations that were in-between each reference. These initial outputs served as the foundation for digital paintings that he further painted over in Photoshop.

Installation views of New Beginnings, Old Endings, Secrets Secreting, archival pigmented prints, sizes vary


Titles such as “The Blurry Edges of Your Profile Draw Me In” and “Careless Caress” point to the tensions between self-perception and a life increasingly mediated through screens. Early neural network outputs, often referred to as “dreams,” possess a surreal and sometimes haunting quality; mirroring the hopes and fears tied to emergent technologies. Southworth’s works intertwine his personal hopes and fears with a broader meditation on alienation, effacement, and the shifting boundaries of self. 

Through these works, Southworth explores the erasure of identity in the face of advancing technology. AI, with its promise and peril, can magnify the alienation and division already embedded in our digital lives. Yet, as artists, we find power in wielding the imperfect to reclaim the human amidst the machine.